OMF-funded Red Blood Cell Deformability Research Study Published

January 1, 2019

As promised, below is the link to the complete version of the Red Blood Cell (RBC) Deformability research paper, which has now been formally published, open source, in Clinical Hemorheology and Microcirculation. The authors are Mohsen Nemat-Gorgani, PhD, of Stanford University, and Anand Ramasubramanian, PhD, of San Jose State University, in collaboration with Ron Davis, PhD, and their teams.

This important study has been fully funded by OMF through the support of our generous donors. I extend my personal thank you for your support of our mission to end ME/CFS. The OMF community is standing strong together in support of this urgent research.

Please read the summary from Dr. Ron Davis and the publication below. Every day, together we are breaking ground and moving closer to answers.

Linda Tannenbaum, Founder & CEO/President

Red Blood Cell Deformability Complete Research Study Published

Written by Ronald W. Davis, PhD

This paper documents that red blood cells are less deformable in ME/CFS patients compared to healthy controls. It potentially could be a biomarker, and we are proceeding to design new devices that will make a clear distinction between patients and healthy controls. These devices will be hand-held and easy to use by doctors in their offices, or in clinical testing labs. Past work has looked primarily at the shape of red blood cells, which is difficult to quantitate. Our approach will give a clear quantitative number. It measures the ability of red blood cells to deform while squeezing into a capillary, something that blood cells must do for healthy flow. We measure hundreds of cells from each patient, so, because of this, even though the number of patients is low, we get a very statistically significant distinction between patient and healthy cells’ deformability. We are putting our energy into developing the new devices as soon as possible.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION:

We observed from various measures of deformability that the RBCs isolated from ME/CFS patients were significantly stiffer than those from healthy controls. Our observations suggest that RBC transport through microcapillaries may explain, at least in part, the ME/CFS phenotype, and promises to be a novel first-pass diagnostic test.